We know car commuting is expensive, more expensive than is commonly recognized. That’s because every time we get in the car, we’re not presented with a bill for gas, maintenance, insurance, lost productivity, etc.

That suburban dream home comes with a hidden cost: $125,000 in transportation costs each decade. Photo: Flickr, Remodeleze

Let’s say the tabulation was all there: the cost of your car commute. Maybe even included with mortgage paperwork, so everyone could understand the full costs of their housing decisions. Would people think twice about that large-lot beauty a few miles farther down the interstate?

Well, wonder no more. A personal finance blogger who goes by the name Mr. Money Mustache has done the math. Calculating at the federal reimbursement rate of 51 cents per mile, a car commute can get pricey fast. In fact, a 19-mile SOV car commute translates into $75,000 in costs for that commuter over 10 years, plus about 1.3 years of work time wasted in traffic. For a two-car household driving financed cars, that’s $125,000 and almost 3 years of potential working time wasted every decade.

David Edmunson at Network blog Greater Marin got to thinking: What do those costs mean to a whole community? He did the math for his city and here is what he found:

How much time and money is lost to commuting alone in Marin? The average drive-alone Marinite travels 11.46 miles to work, the distance from Petaluma to Novato. After taking into account a bit of tolling and parking, this average joe spends $3,800 and 24 working days on his commute each year. If he valued his time as much as his employer, that lost time is worth another $6,500. This works out to almost $50,000 in lost wealth and 7 wasted months over a decade. As a county, we spend $565 million every year to commute alone, and every decade we lose an astounding $7.3 billion in wealth and $9.5 billion worth of time. Each 1% of the commuting populace that drives alone rather than paying down a mortgage costs Marin’s economy $106.4 million every decade.

Infill development is one way out of this mess. By bringing workers and jobs closer together, Marinites will be able to save time and money if they want to drive, to the tune of $255 per mile closer to work, and will be more likely to bike or walk to work. These don’t need to be monstrous apartment buildings or affordable housing, but there are enough redundant parking garages and vacant lots to provide a healthy amount of space without damaging the fabric and culture of our towns.

The other way out is through improved transit investments. Although travel by transit is often no faster, and sometimes slower, than driving, that time can be put to more productive use than simply driving through stop-and-go traffic on 101, and transit is almost always cheaper than driving. Switching from driving to taking the wifi-equipped 101 bus to San Francisco, for example, can save a Novato commuter up to $11,000 per year in parking fees, tolls and vehicle wear-and-tear.

Imagine the thousands of ways Marin could better utilize that money and energy. When will communities start catching on?

Elsewhere on the Network today: Shareable explains a new toolkit that allows communities to crowdsource livability solutions. Urban Adonia shares the story of a 60-year-old woman, the blogger’s mom, giving a bike-transit commute her first try. And the Wash Cycle reports that New York City, like DC, has chosen not to require helmets on its upcoming bike-share system.

Not to defend sprawl or mega-commutes, but this analysis is much too one-sided to take seriously. It’s not as if people just piled $125K in cash their driveway and set fire to it. Much of that money flows back into the community: good blue-collar jobs for street crews and mechanics, not to mention car-factory employees around the country. Of course, the money would be more wisely invested if invested in infrastructure for walking/biking/transit, but if sustainable transportation advocates are going to try to put hard numbers on the cost of sprawl, they really should do it right.

carma

angie, the cost for owning a car cant be more true, but your time calculated cant be more wrong

how does 1.3 years wasted round into 3 years wasted for a 2 car household?
1.3 * 2 does not round to 3.

first off, that 1.3 years is already counting for 2 cars.

plus even this figure is grossly off.

in order for one to accumulate .67 years of wasted time, you would have to be driving 140 minutes per day to get .67 years of wasted time spanned over 10 years. (assuming one works for 5 days a week for 50 weeks / year). far from the 80 minutes time used for an average commute.

no doubt that we would waste so much time brainlessly driving, but the figures are far from what the real time wasted is. i would say your numbers are inflated by a factor of 4.

Andy

The cost to own a car is certainly significant, but I’ve never seen a good calculation including the cost to park that car at home too. How much extra does that 2 car garage cost, or the paved driveway leading up to it? Plus you have recurring taxes each year on that space.

I think the real struggle is that a 5 mile commute by car costs nearly as much as a 10 or 20 mile car commute. The vast majority of the cost is by owning and insuring the car, so the gas and maintenance on a few extra miles is not very significant. What we need is a good way to convince households to reduce the number of cars, but we know that’s not an easy task.

I have trouble with the concept of “”wasted” time driving as well. I bike 20 minutes to work (about 5 minutes more than if I were to drive). Am I wasting that 20 minutes by not living in the apartment above my office?

Angie Schmitt

Sorry. You’re right. That’s *working* years.

carma

Guest,

Also would like to add that $125000 isnt burned by driving. taking mass transit (if one was available) isnt free either. Sure it would likely be less than driving, but its not $0 over 10 years either. so you CANT pay that mortgage completely if you gave up driving.

http://Streetsblog.net Angie Schmitt

Sorry. You’re right. It’s *working* years.

http://Streetsblog.net Angie Schmitt

All you guys should read the original article. He has explanations for all the concerns you raised (with the exception of parking). You aren’t wasting your time biking because you are getting exercise. Otherwise you’d have to spend 20 minutes at the gym.

Also, Carma, he advises moving to a house where you can bike or walk to work, effectively cutting commute costs to $0.

Anonymous

Although I strongly support the conclusion (car-oriented development is wasteful) I really have a problem with this kind of sloppy analysis.

First, as others have already mentioned, you can not look at the cost of owning and operating a car in a vacuum. It is only meaningful relative to the cost of other substitutes, such as transit or living within walking distance, both of which are also expensive. Transit is generally cheaper on a marginal basis (e.g. the annual cost of bus/train pass is far less than the cost of owning and operating a car) but that is partly because so many of the costs of transit are explicitly picked up by government.

Transit is a more efficient way to move people, but only when the development and land use patterns are arranged in such a way as to take advantage of this efficiency. The historical dis-investment in transit, and (over) investment in auto infrastructure, means that right now in most places in the US transit will be more expensive than private cars. You can’t just run an ad campaign and get people to sell their cars and take the bus; you first need a massive shift in infrastructure investment to make riding transit competitive with driving in terms of cost, time, and convenience … then people will respond over time by shifting away from cars.

Thom P Johnson

No, your getting some exercise.

http://thegreatermarin.wordpress.com/ OctaviusIII

The $125k is lost wealth and, in a sense, each individual really is putting it in a driveway and burning it. Economy-wide, the businesses supported by that cash are a) auto shops, b) gas stations, c) parking lots/garages, d) insurance companies, e) car companies. Indirectly you can add road construction, but that’s after it’s collected and redistributed by governments, and manufacturing, which is after it’s collected and redistributed by the car companies.

Those last two – the blue-collar industries – could be repurposed doing better work on transit and transportation enhancements. The rest of that $125k is mostly leaving the area rather than being invested either in paying down debt (a major cause of our economic malaise) or into local downtowns. Investing money badly IS burning it; collectively, we’re making a poor investment decision.

carma

angie, biking is not $0 still. its close to it. lets say $500 for a decent bike, $20 in tubes and you get the idea.

but i’ll give it to you. its as close to $0 as you can get.

carma

@bd6b44e402dc0fb5a28150b4fd1ee602:disqus
hmm. exercise and commuting at the same time? no way.. say it aint so.. you mean you can do more than one thing at the same time other than focusing on the road driving? wow.. where do i sign up? =)

Andy

Angie, I actually disagree on both your points to some extent, but I’ll admit my examples are not from the average person trying to lose a household car.

I ride my bike 3000 miles a year recreationally, plus 2000 in commuting year round. I’m a pretty skinny guy, and have a hard time keeping on enough weight because I’m burning off too many calories. I know that this is a rare problem in this country, but I really don’t need or want the exercise. I bike recreationally because I love going out in the country and riding with friends, and I commute by bike because walking would take too long and driving costs too much and parking is not an option where I work, but exercise is not a priority for me.

Your reply to Carma is misleading. While it is possible to bike on the cheap, people that bike to work everyday are still paying a bit for that option. This is especially true in colder climates, which require finding the right layers and parts to stay warm and dry. A reasonable entry-level commuter bike with racks and fenders might run for around $500, though a beginner should also expect to be paying the higher prices of maintenance (changing tubes, chains, installing fenders, etc.) until they learn to do that themselves. Walking is certain cheap, though I’d hesitate to call any option free.

http://Streetsblog.net Angie Schmitt

Carma,

You’re right. I think it cost a few hundred dollars a year to bike, pretty much negligible from the standpoint of this discussion.

I have to say, I did exactly what this guy recommended. Moved to where I could bike/walk to work and most activities and since then, my back account has been growing steadily. I think I owe what little financial health I have entirely to my decision to live in a walkable urban neighborhood.

http://thegreatermarin.wordpress.com/ OctaviusIII

(Author here) – You can actually play with the numbers yourself – a link to the spreadsheet with all the variables and such are at the bottom of the article. I realize I’m taking this in a vacuum, but this is done not with transit in mind but with walking and biking. Transit investments will cost hundreds of millions, but it will reap dividends. The Novato to San Francisco commuter, for example, saves $11k EVERY YEAR by taking the bus instead of driving.

To make the analysis more complete, to compare it to transit, say, we’d need to find the number of transit commuters, the average trip length for a transit commuter and the average fare of a bus commuter. The statistics on these are highly imprecise if we want to isolate commuters only, as I can’t find any stats on average transit commute trip length for Marin or average transit commute trip fare. Those would need to be estimated out of the data for average overall commute length and average overall fares.

ZA_SF

For pricing the value of a 2-car garage & asphalt driveway, I suggest you look at the comps. Half that garage could easily be another bedroom and bathroom; and that driveway could be more landscaped (or edible) garden. See what a house with +1 bedroom & bath goes for in that neighborhood. At a complete guesstimate, I’d say that’s worth at least +$30K. The clear application of this is the “in-law” conversion, generating rental income for the owner. Turn that net cost into a net profit.

Anonymous

@abb249055208c7af4d35568e422dfd63:disqus That money would still flow back into the community if they weren’t wasting it on car commuting. People would have more money to spend on travel, going out to eat, etc instead of spending it on car commuting. Thinking about things in terms of how much money it puts back into the economy never solves the problem. We don’t have an economy for the sake of itself … you make it sound like we must keep the economy alive for the sake of itself. Instead, the economy is there to serve us and our needs, and to argue that using an inefficient, dangerous, and unhealthy form of transit (cars) is the only way to keep the economy healthy is ridiculous. There are *so* many better way to put money back into a community (assuming you even want to prioritize that) than driving around wastefully.

Anonymous

@Andy This isn’t about you, me, or any other individual. It’s about the statistics. Statistically, Americans are way overweight, and there is absolutely no doubt that riding a bike burns more calories than sitting in your car and hence is a good thing for the *vast majority* of people and hence for society in general. Sure, there may be exceptions for thin people like yourself who don’t need the extra calories burned by riding a bike, but we don’t decide policy by exceptions. Also, there are more benefits to exercise than just burning calories, so it isn’t just about weight problems: http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/exercise/HQ01676

So back to your original question: no, one (speaking statistically) is not wasting time riding their bike 20 minutes instead of driving their car 20 minutes. And same for public transit, where you can read, mess with your phone, eat, etc. Car commuting is by far, the biggest waste of time of any form of transit (in addition to being the most dangerous, most polluting, and loudest).

carma

heres one amazing thing i can do during my commute on a bus/train/bus combo.

i learned japanese. yes. listening to podcasts, studying notes, etc… i did this over the course of a few years. i figure i have a 3 hour round trip commute. might as well use that time for something useful. now certainly, this is not wasted time.

i cant claim that while driving.

Anonymous

I totally agree that commuting by car is very expensive, but I think that aggregating it over ten years is a cheap trick for shock value, especially when you read it on a headline that doesn’t mention the time frame involved. In this context, one would first assume that the figure is for one year, so one can compare it with salary/income figures which are normally quoted as annual figures (at least in the US; in other places monthly may be more popular).

Anonymous

ZA_SF, is a bedroom and bath really more valuable than a garage in the suburbs, given the current infrastructure? Could you readily sell such a house? I guess it depends on the distance from the house to civilization or whether it is possible and practical to park on the street.

Anonymous

@qrt145:disqus In my 1940′s-1950′s vintage suburban SF Bay Area neighborhood the houses all originally had 1 car garages. The houses which have converted their garages to a bedroom are generally worth about $30-50,000 more than the ones that have retained their garages (the price variation comes from the quality of the conversion and weather the house originally had 2 or 3 bedrooms). Since my town doesn’t restrict garage conversions, about 1 in 5 houses here have done so.

peternatural

My wife and I only save a measly $5K per year since we ditched our car two years ago. But we weren’t using it for daily routines like commuting (preferring to bus or bike here in SF), or it would have been more.

OTOH, that’s $5K/year *after taxes* (so more like $7-8K of earnings). And yeah, if you put it on a 10-year time scale, it does start to add up to real money

PRE

Well, I’d LOVE an 11.46 mile commute! Marin has it easy. Here in Alameda Co, from what I can tell about I-880, the commutes are much longer.

http://profiles.google.com/hallman Bruce Hallman

What about the external costs?

The Mr. Money Mustache article is titled “The True Cost of Commuting”, yet it ignores many types of commuting costs. The “true” cost should also include externalized costs, such as costs to government (hence our taxes) to provide road construction, maintenance, police, ambulances, street lighting, traffic signals, costs to health (our health care dollars) for deaths and illnesses due to air pollution, costs of Federal government subsidies of the oil industry and arguably to fight wars in oil countries (again from our taxes), and costs of environmental damage/climate change (cost passed on to our children). The true costs should not ignore these other external, but never-the-less very real costs directly attributable to commuting in a car.

Davistrain

One of the reasons why we got into this situation is that driving used to be a lot cheaper. (someone will make the comparison with dope dealers selling the first few bags cheaply and then jacking up the price after the junkie is hooked). From the time I started driving in the late 1950′s until the big “wakeup call” in 1973, gas was about 25 cents a gallon. A reasonably handy person could buy an old clunker for a hundred bucks or so and keep it running with spare parts from Sears, Pep Boys or the local wrecking yard. No smog checks to worry about, and in the mild climate of California, jalopies that would have long since fallen victim to road salt and freezing temperatures would still provide transport for the financially challenged. When I was young, part of many families’ “oral traditions” was stories about how “Your Uncle Ed and I bought this old Model T [Ford] for $15, kept it running with tape and baling wire, ran it until the wheels fell off…..” Then there was the old line about how handing a teenager a driver’s license automatically switched off the section of the brain devoted to bicycle riding.
Of course these comments tell everyone who reads them that I am an old dude, and my generation is slowly but surely fading out. We should probably apologize for using up so much of the world’s resources, but it was all so cheap back then, and most humans don’t do well when it comes to looking far ahead and being sensible.

Anonymous

Absolutely. A negative externity of mass transit is higher use drives denser schedules with more express service. Strong mass transit is a regional asset with positive value which gets reflected in property value. In contrast, SOV use increases congestion, a negative asset which diminishes property value. Additionally more car use means more land devoted for cars, which is a huge community and individual cost, including opportunity cost of less land for parks. Written from the train (don’t try this while driving)….

Joe R.

I actually have a pretty good handle on the upper limit of bicycle operating costs. I put about $500 into my Raleigh 3 years ago. I’ve since put about 5100 miles on it. I’d say the parts are good for at least another 5000 miles, if not more. That puts my operating costs at around 5 cents per mile tops. Tires are probably the biggest “consumeable” on a bike. The airless tires I’m using last at least 3 times a long as air tires. I also avoid the expense of regularly replacing inner tubes once they end up with maybe half a dozen patches.

Purchase price can be factored in as well, but the truth is you can get an OK beater bike for practically nothing, then put a few hundred in decent parts into it. If you buy something better, you can probably amortize the purchase price over a lifetime of riding, making it practically negligible. For example, I recently picked up an Airborne titanium bike on eBay for $1225 ( pictures: http://s91.photobucket.com/albums/k318/jtr1962/Airborne%20Titanium%20Bike/ ) because my Raleigh is over 25 years old and starting to get a lot of rust. Really, the only things which might wear out on the new bike are the tires and drivetrain, but that will be the case with any bike. If I amortize the purchase price over 40 years of riding (say 120,000 miles), it barely comes to a cent per mile. And I still have at least 5000 miles left on the Raleigh. With a new paint job, it which should suffice for years of beater bike duty. Bottom line-biking isn’t totally free, but at maybe 5 cents per mile it’s close.

To address Andy’s original comment, commuting to work via bike is hardly “wasted” time. True that you can’t read or do work as you can on public transit. However, you’re effectively saving the time you might otherwise use to exercise by incorporating it into your commute. And if you used to exercise at a gym, you’re saving membership fees. Besides, riding is just plain fun, whereas driving or even taking public transit is often a chore.

Hallam Jon

Hey,

There are a few ‘hidden’ problems with this assessment. For example, I used to live a 30-40 minute commute to work by local train. This included walking to the station near my house, potentially a 10 minute wait, 10 minutes on the train, and a 10 minute walk. Great! Choosing that house imposed a 40 minute commute by car on my partner though.

We’ve since changed jobs, and I now have to commute 80minutes by car. My partner still has to commute 30minutes by car. I could still commute by train, but this takes 120minutes. Where I can work away from the office, I prefer to do that work from home one day a week and avoid commuting that day entirely.

We could shorten our commute, and maybe even make public transport possible for one of us again, by moving house; however, this is an expensive process largely due to ‘stamp duty’ (a percentage payment of the value of any new house you buy). Additionally, if we had children it would be necessary to have some continuity in their schooling.

These factors mean flexibility of destinations is an important feature of where we choose to live – i.e. we do not only consider our actual commute, but the parameter space of all possible commutes that we might make in the period we expect to live in that particular house. Since living on top of a major rail station has problems of its own (not least because its the obvious solution and therefore very expensive), this kind of analysis often favours ‘suburban’ living.

All times are each way (i.e. double for total daily commute).

Yours,

JMH

Charlie Hayes

I started reading

Charlie Hayes

I started reading this article as an interesting fact about something that has nothing to do with me as I am a traveling consultant (Which is disappointing, I know, I hate it too).

The example sighted in this article had me floored. Marin? Could they mean Marin county? Petaluma?? Petaluma is where the hotel my company has me staying in. Novato??? That is where my client’s site is!

So in addition to the horrible inefficiencies of the commute in the example, I’m flying 2000 miles every Monday and 2000 miles every Thursday.

Alexander III

lmao, you anti-car communists really need to find something better to do at your spare time.
I can more than afford the “$125,000″ (laughably incorrect) figure.

http://thegreatermarin.wordpress.com/ OctaviusIII

There are any number of reasons why not to move or change jobs, and some are quite good, but if your interest is piqued you might want to take a look at the Mr. Money Moustache article instead. He takes an individualized look at the numbers from The Greater Marin, and the article’s comments are fabulous.

http://thegreatermarin.wordpress.com/ OctaviusIII

By the way, that (extremely rough) estimation gets Marin residents spending only $10.4 million on transit fares per year, or $135.1 million per decade. That’s $1,635 per year or $21,157.21 per decade for an individual.

Shifting that 1% from SOV to transit saves residents $6.7 million per year and $87.2 million per decade. I’ll leave it up to you to do the math on government expenditures on roads vs. transit per commute trip.

Steven

Abogo has done a similar analysis of transportation costs that covers much of the United States. The site has different results than ‘Mr. Money Mustache’. There is even a search option where you can discover estimates of transportation costs in your own neighborhood.

abogo.cnt.org

Aaaasdf

Want a cookie?

Mackenzie_evan

So here’s something really silly – I ride my bike to work every day, but my car that sits parked at home for weeks at a time STILL costs me more in maintenance. I went in to get a quote for new shocks and struts the other day and a guy asked me what mileage I get on my bike. “50 miles per burrito,” I said. I should have responded by telling him the cost to have that stuff installed on my car for routine maintenance was more than I paid for my bike. I pay more to insure my car every year than I paid for that bike. Why????!!!! The only reason I keep it is so I can drive to races, which makes those races pretty darn expensive.
OK, so if we’re talking 50 cents a mile, and I ride my commuter +/-1,500 miles a year, that’s $750 a year in expenses I’m saving. Another bike!

http://www.insurancesos.co.uk/ Insurance UK

This is true that car commuting is expensive.

TiredCommuter

For me it’s not the cost of commuting. It’s how much time I’m losing being away from my family. I think that’s the bigger sacrifice for how long it’s takes people to get to and from work.

http://twitter.com/snogglethorpe Miles Bader

Keep in mind that not all transit is government run/subsidized.

In Tokyo, where the vast majority of transit is privately own/run/financed, transit costs are not significantly greater than they are in U.S. cities. The yearly cost for a typical commuter pass in Tokyo is hmm, maybe $1500 or less (lots of variables, but that’s in the ballpark), and say you spend an extra $5 per day on weekdays and $10 on weekends for “leisure” travel (going to restaurants, etc). In total that’s about $3800 / year, so round up and say $4000.

Even if you add in monthly long-distance intercity travel, occasional car rentals for those times when you really need a car, etc., you’re still going to be comfortably under the $7500 / year “base cost” given in this story for owning a car (costs like “time wasted” are a bit harder to compare; train commutes take time too, but it’s easier to do something productive during that time…). [Of course, for someone actually in Tokyo, the cost of car ownership will be a lot higher, and the advantages fewer.]

You’re totally spot-on, of course, in saying that land-use/development patterns are key. It’s too bad that not only are U.S. cities generally not progressive in this (e.g. public transit agencies have a very restricted remit), they’re usually regressive, with zoning laws and infrastructure funding pushing development into non-transit-friendly patterns.

Doug

Nice article, but: I believe the costs are much higher. We don’t have an accounting system to compute this. Health care costs for obesity from no exercise? Subsidization of gasoline? Cost of wars to preserve the sources? Loss of young lives? Veterans medical care? it just go on and on! The hegemony of the automobile has to end!

All development should have equal space for residence and jobs!

I don’t know if it’s already out there, but I’ve come up with an idea I’ll share with anyone. To incentivize this inner city development provide a tax break for anyone who walks (orbikes, of course) to work.

Doug

Sorry, didn’t read this before my more recent comment. Clearly we agree!

Follow Streetsblog

Transportation for America

America's transportation system is half a century behind--causing unnecessary pollution, expense, and congestion. We need our leaders to invest in public transportation, high-speed passenger rail, streets safe for biking and walking, maintaining our roads and transit systems, and green innovation.